GRAVITY RAINBOW (15 page)

Dr. Rozsavolgyi feels that there well might, if the fellows "play their cards right." The only issue now is survival-on through the awful interface of V-E Day, on into the bright new Postwar with senses and memories intact. PISCES must not be allowed to go down under the hammer with the rest of the bawling herd. There must arise, and damned soon, able to draw them into a phalanx, a concentrated point of light, some leader or program powerful enough to last them across who knows how many years of Postwar. Dr. Rozsavolgyi tends to favor a powerful program over a powerful leader. Maybe because this is 1945. It was widely believed in those days that behind the War-all the death, savagery, and destruction-lay the Fuhrer-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma… that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources…

Isn't that what's really at stake for Dr. Rozsavolgyi here in this latest scheme, centered on the figure of Lieutenant Slothrop? All the psychological tests in the subject's dossier, clear back to his college days, indicate a diseased personality. "Rosie" slaps the file with his hand for emphasis. The staff table shudders. "For
exam-
ple
:
his Minne
so
-ta, Mul
-
ti
pha-
sic
Person
al
ity
In
ventory
is tre
men-
dously lop
si
ded
,
always
fa
-vor of, the psycho-pathic, and, the un
wbole
-some
."

But the Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit is not fond of the MMPI.

"Rosie, are there scales for measuring interpersonal traits?" Hawk's nose probing, probing, eyes lowered in politic meekness,
"Human
values? Trust, honesty, love? Is there-forgive me the special pleading- a religious scale, by any chance?"

No way, padre: the MMPI was developed about 1943. In the very heart of the War. Allport and Vernon's Study of Values, the Bernreuter Inventory as revised by Flanagan in '35-tests from before the War- seem to Paul de la Nuit more humane. All the MMPI appears to test for is whether a man will be a good or bad soldier.

"Soldiers are much in demand these days, Reverend Doctor," murmurs Mr. Pointsman.

"I only hope that we won't put too much emphasis on his MMPI scores. It seems to me very narrow. It omits large areas of the human personality."

"Pre
cise
-ly
why,"
leaps Rozsavolgyi, "we are now proposing, to give, Sloth-rop a com
plete-
ly
dif
-ferent sort, of test. We are now de
sign-
ing for him, a so-
called,
'projec-tive' test. The most
famil
-iar
exam-
ple of the
type,
is the Rorschach
ink
-blot. The
ba-
sic theory, is that when given an un
struc
-tured stimulus, some shape-less
blob
of exper-ience, the subject, will seek to impose,
struc-
ture
on
it. How, he goes a
-bout struc
-turing this blob, will reflect his
needs,
his hopes-will pro
vide
,
us with
clues,
to his dreams,
fan-
tasies
,
the deepest
re
-gions of his mind." Eyebrows going a mile a minute, extraordinarily fluid and graceful hand gestures, resembling-most likely it is deliberate, and who can blame Rosie for trying to cash in-those of his most famous compatriot, though there're the inevitable bad side-effects: staff who swear they've seen him crawling headfirst down the north facade of "The White Visitation," for example. "So we are
re
-ally, quite, in
agree
ment, Reverend Doctor. A test, like the MMP
I
, is, in this respect, not adequate. It is, a
struc
-tured stimulus. The sub-ject can
fal-
sify
,
consciously, or repress,
un
-consciously. But with the projec-tive tech
nique,
nothing he can do, con-scious or otherwise, can pre
-vent
us, from finding what we wish, to know. We, are in control. He, cannot
help,
himself."

"Must say it doesn't sound like your cup of tea, Pointsman," smiles Dr. Aaron Throwster. "Your stimuli are more the structured sort, aren't they?"

"Let's say I find a certain shameful fascination."

"Let's not. Don't tell me you're going to keep your fine Pavlovian hand completely out of this."

"Well, not completely, Throwster, no. Since you've brought it up.

We
also
happen to have in mind a very structured stimulus. Same one, in fact, that got us interested to begin with. We want to expose Slothrop to the German rocket…"

Overhead, on the molded plaster ceiling, Methodist versions of Christ's kingdom swarm: lions cuddle with lambs, fruit spills lushly and without pause into the arms and about the feet of gentlemen and ladies, swains and milkmaids. No one's expression is quite right. The wee creatures leer, the fiercer beasts have a drugged or sedated look, and none of the humans have any eye-contact at all. The ceilings of "The White Visitation" aren't the only erratic thing about the place, either. It is a classic "folly," all right. The buttery was designed as an Arabian harem in miniature, for reasons we can only guess at today, full of silks, fretwork and peepholes. One of the libraries served, for a time, as a wallow, the floor dropped three feet and replaced with mud up to the thresholds for giant Gloucestershire Old Spots to frolic, oink, and cool their summers in, to stare at the shelves of buckram books and wonder if they'd be good eating. Whig eccentricity is carried in this house to most unhealthy extremes. The rooms are triangular, spherical, walled up into mazes. Portraits, studies in genetic curiosity, gape and smirk at you from every vantage. The W.C.s contain frescoes of Clive and his elephants stomping the French at Plassy, fountains that depict Salome with the head of John (water gushing out ears, nose, and mouth), floor mosaics in which are tessellated together different versions of Homo Monstrosus, an interesting preoccupation of the time-cyclops, humanoid giraffe, centaur repeated in all directions. Everywhere are archways, grottoes, plaster floral arrangements, walls hung in threadbare velvet or brocade. Balconies give out at unlikely places, overhung with gargoyles whose fangs have fetched not a few newcomers nasty cuts on the head. Even in the worst rains, the monsters only just manage to drool-the rainpipes feeding them are centuries out of repair, running crazed over slates and beneath eaves, past cracked pilasters, dangling Cupids, terra-cotta facing on every floor, along with belvederes, rusticated joints, pseudo-Italian columns, looming minarets, leaning crooked chimneys-from a distance no two observers, no matter how close they stand, see quite the same building in that orgy of self-expression, added to by each succeeding owner, until the present War's requisitioning. Topiary trees line the drive for a distance before giving way to larch and elm: ducks, bottles, snails, angels, and steeplechase riders they dwindle down the metaled road into their fallow silence, into the shadows under the tunnel of sighing trees. The sentry, a dark figure in white webbing, stands port-arms in

your masked headlamps, and you must halt for him. The dogs, engineered and lethal, are watching you from the woods. Presently, as evening comes on, a few bitter flakes of snow begin to fall.

Better behave yourself or we'll send you back to Dr. Jamf!

When Jamf conditioned
him,
he threw away the stimulus.

Looks like Dr. Jamf's been by to
set your
little thing today, hasn't he?

– 
Neil Nosepicker's Book of 50,000 Insults,

§6.72, "Awful Offspring,"

The Nayland Smith Press,

Cambridge (Mass.), 1933

pudding.-But isn't this-

pointsman: Sir?

pudding: Isn't it all rather shabby, Pointsman? Meddling with another man's mind this way?

POINTSMAN: Brigadier, we're only following in a long line of experiment and questioning. Harvard University, the U.S. Army? Hardly shabby institutions.

PUDDING: We can't, Pointsman, it's beastly.

POINTSMAN: But the Americans have already been
at
him! don't you see? It's not as if we're corrupting a virgin or something-

pudding: Do we have to do it because the Americans do it? Must we allow them to corrupt
us?

Back around 1920, Dr. Laszlo Jamf opined that if Watson and Rayner could successfully condition their "Infant Albert" into a reflex horror of everything furry, even of his own Mother in a fur boa, then Jamf could certainly do the same thing for his Infant Tyrone, and the baby's sexual reflex. Jamf was at Harvard that year, visiting from Darmstadt. It was in the early part of his career, before he phased into organic chemistry (to be as fateful a change of field as Kekule's own famous switch into chemistry from architecture, a century before). For the experiment he had a slender grant from the National Research Council (under a continuing NRC program of psychological study which had begun during the World War, when methods were needed for selecting officers and classifying draftees). Shoestring funding may have been why Jamf, for his target reflex, chose an infant hardon.

Measuring secretions, as Pavlov did, would have meant surgery. Measuring "fear," the reflex Watson chose, would have brought in too much subjectivity (what's fear? How much is "a lot"? Who decides, when it's on-the-spot-in-the-field, and there isn't time to go through the long slow process of referring it up to the Fear Board?). Instrumentation just wasn't available in those days. The best he might've done was the Larson-Keeler three-variable "lie detector," but at the time it was still only experimental.

But a harden, that's either there, or it isn't. Binary, elegant. The job of observing it can even be done by a
student.

Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab.

Unconditioned response = hardon.

Conditioned stimulus =
x.

Conditioned response = hardon whenever
x
is present, stroking is no longer necessary, all you need is that
x.

Uh,
x?
well, what's
x?
Why, it's the famous "Mystery Stimulus" that's fascinated generations of behavioral-psychology students, is what it is. The average campus humor magazine carries 1.05 column inches per year on the subject, which ironically is the exact mean length Jamf reported for Infant T.'s erection.

Now ordinarily, according to tradition in these matters, the little sucker would have been de-conditioned. Jamf would have, in Pavlov-ian terms, "extinguished" the hardon reflex he'd built up, before he let the baby go. Most likely he did. But as Ivan Petrovich himself said, "Not only must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditioned reflex, but we must also realize that extinction can proceed
beyond
the point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree of extinction
only
by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there can still be
a silent extinction beyond the zero.'
¹
''
Italics are Mr. Pointsman's.

Can a conditioned reflex survive in a man, dormant, over 20 or 30 years? Did Dr. Jamf extinguish only to zero-wait till the infant showed zero hardons in the presence of stimulus
x,
and then stop? Did he forget-or ignore-the "silent extinction beyond the zero"? If he ignored it, why? Did the National Research Council have anything to say about that?

When Slothrop was discovered, late in 1944, by "The White Visitation"-though many there have always known him as the famous Infant Tyrone-like the New World, different people thought they'd discovered different things.

Roger Mexico thinks it's a statistical oddity. But he feels the foundations of that discipline trembling a bit now, deeper than oddity ought to drive. Odd, odd, odd-think of the word: such white finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the tongue-stop – beyond the zero-and into the other realm. Of course you don't move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that's how you
ought
to be moving.

Rollo Groast thinks it's precognition. "Slothrop is able to predict when a rocket will fall at a particular place. His survival to date is evidence he's acted on advance information, and avoided the area at the time the rocket was supposed to fall." Dr. Groast is not sure how, or even if, sex comes into it.

But Edwin Treacle, that most Freudian of psychical researchers, thinks Slothrop's gift is psychokinesis. Slothrop is, with the force of his mind,
causing
the rockets to drop where they do. He may not be physically highballing them about the sky: but maybe he is fooling with the electrical signals inside the rocket's guidance system. However he's doing it, sex
does
come into Dr. Treacle's theory. "He subconsciously needs to abolish all trace of the sexual Other, whom he symbolizes on his map, most significantly, as a
star,
that anal-sadistic emblem of classroom success which so permeates elementary education in America…"

It's the map that spooks them all, the map Slothrop's been keeping on his girls. The stars fall in a Poisson distribution, just like the rocket strikes on Roger Mexico's map of the Robot Blitz.

But, well, it's a bit more than the distribution. The two patterns also happen to be identical. They match up square for square. The slides that Teddy Bloat's been taking of Slothrop's map have been projected onto Roger's, and the two images, girl-stars and rocket-strike circles, demonstrated to coincide.

Helpfully, Slothrop has dated most of his stars. A star always comes
before
its corresponding rocket strike. The strike can come as quickly as two days, or as slowly as ten. The mean lag is about 4'/2 days.